This Code is Cracked

By Rick Horowitz

Mary Patrice, she thinks she knows everything, she comes running into the living room smack in the middle of "Billy's Bait Shop," stands right in front of the TV, starts yelling, "Found me another one, Cody! Found me another one!"

Plus she's got that grin of hers.

I ask her to move her pretty little self out of the way for a bit, Billy being right at the exact point of identifying the "Worm of the Week," which is the absolute highlight of the program if you ask me. Which she does, but not till I miss half of it anyhow, so I'm riled up to start with, and I can tell she's not gonna make it any better.

"This one's about President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe!" she says, and she plops right down on the sofa and starts waving the Reader's Digest under my nose. She's got circles and arrows and red ink all over the thing.

"Doesn't sound like a Reader's Digest kind of story," I say to her. "They're not much for scandal stories down at the Reader's Digest." Mary Patrice looks at me like I'm crazy.

"It's not the story," she says. "It's the code!"

I knew she was gonna say that. She's been saying that all week, ever since she read about this book called "The Bible Code" or something. That's the one where the fella put all the words and letters from the Bible together end to end, then he went and counted out every tenth letter or fiftieth letter or what-have-you, and he found all these spelled-out messages in there about the future, things like Pearl Harbor and Watergate and the Oklahoma City bombing and even Bill Clinton being elected President, right there in the Bible.

That's what he says, anyway.

Me, I have my doubts. I just can't figure out how 3,000 years ago God already decided on Bill Clinton, let alone bothered to write it down. But that's me. Mary Patrice, she figures it different, she figures God can do anything He wants to do, that it's all in there somewhere if you just know where to look for it and how to look for it.

Mary Patrice, she's looking for it in Reader's Digest. She loaned out her Bible for the Christmas diorama down at the gas company last year, never got it back. She figures Reader's Digest is about the closest thing to the Bible we've still got in the house except maybe the Yellow Pages, which is too heavy to wave, and God can put it in Reader's Digest too if he wants to.

So that's mostly where she's looking, and how she's looking is the same way the fella who wrote the book did, except for no computers. She's just counting the letters up and down and sideways and even diagonal like those magazine puzzles, and she sees what gets spelled out. This one she's showing me now, she's got "JOHNK" and "STAR" and "BLNODE" all circled right near each other. She figures it's proof positive.

"That's not how you spell `blonde'," I tell her.

"Close enough," she says.

And it's not just famous people she's after. She says if it's all in there, it's all in there, so in between digging out hidden messages about celebrities and wars and all, she also broke the code about Tiny Montgomery down at the general store cheating on Rondelle, which Mary Patrice had suspected for the longest time, not to mention the one about how Suky Anne Calabreeze is just as big a tramp as everyone says she is. Mary Patrice decoded that one from the TV Guide.

"You can find anything you want if you dig around long enough," I keep telling her, but she's ready for me. Now she's waving a newspaper article about Princess Diana, and how the fella who wrote the book told some newspaper he decoded a Diana message straight from Exodus. "Diana/car accident/death," it said in Exodus, and it even had the right year from the Hebrew calendar, which is sending chills right down Mary Patrice's spine.

"And when did he decode all this stuff about Diana?" I ask her.

"The day after she died," she says. "Isn't that the most amazing coincidence?"

That's one way to look at it.

9/28/97